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How a Jewish Doctor Duped the Nazis

In late 1942, German troops were dying of typhus at the Eastern Front, and the SS medical chief Ernst-Robert Grawitz was impatient for vaccine—as was Heinrich Himmler himself. Typhus terrified the Nazis more than the allied armies did at the time. Nazi ideology had identified typhus, which is spread by lice, as a disease characteristic of parasitic, subhuman people—the Jews—and the Nazi medical profession was taking outrageous measures ostensibly to combat it. This included walling in or closing off Jewish ghettos in cities like Warsaw, Krakow and Lviv, assuring that the disease would indeed spread widely among Jews. That result didn’t bother the Nazis in the least. They had no concern about typhus and its terrifying burden of pain, high fever, psychosis and death—not until the germ began afflicting the German forces locked in battle with the Russians.

But the vaccine production plans of Joachim Mrugowsky, the head of the SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin, kept getting delayed. When British bombers destroyed Mrugowsky’s headquarters in 1942, he decided to produce the vaccine at Buchenwald, thinking that allied bombs would not fall there. Jewish inmates of the concentration camp—those whom the Nazis condemned to death as mere human lice—would be employed to manufacture it, thereby saving the German troops at the front.

The question was: What kind of vaccine should they make? Rudolf Weigl, a famous zoologist credited with creating the first effective typhus vaccine, was employing thousands of Poles in the city of Lviv (Lemberg, the Germans called it; the Polish name was Lwow) in the production of a vaccine made from typhus germs that grew in the intestines of lice after they had fed on human blood. Weigl’s product was approved for the Wehrmacht, but there was no way to create a louse farm at Buchenwald. It would mean introducing millions of lice into a concentration camp, and the SS were terrified of lice. Another approved method—a vaccine produced in chicken eggs— was also impossible at Buchenwald. German civilians, let alone concentration camp inmates, could not be trusted around chickens or their eggs.

So on Dec. 11, 1942, Mrugowsky decided to produce a third type of typhus vaccine, which French scientist Paul Giroud and others had developed at the Pasteur Institute. The vaccine was produced from typhus bacteria grown in the lungs of immune-compromised rabbits. “This vaccine has been tested among concentration camp inmates with excellent results,” Mrugowsky wrote in a memo. Dr. Erwin Ding-Schuler, an ambitious but callow Nazi officer and Mrugowsky’s deputy, was chosen to lead production, and began assembling captive scientists with the help of his new clerk, an imprisoned German intellectual named Eugen Kogon. Among those drafted was a gentle Jewish biologist named Ludwik Fleck, who was a former assistant of Dr. Weigl whom Weigl had protected during the Nazi occupation of Lviv.

Thus began one of the most effective but least-known deceptions of World War II, one that is wondrously thick with irony: For 16 months, working under the noses of his clueless Nazi overseers—in particular Ding-Schuler, whom Fleck described as a “dummkopf”—a Jewish doctor managed to send fake typhus vaccine to the Nazi soldiers at the front, even as he provided the real thing to inoculate his fellow condemned Jews in a concentration camp.

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The deception began on Aug. 10, 1943, when Ding-Schuler and Kogon moved themselves into Block 50, a three-story masonry building at Buchenwald. Block 50 stood half a mile down the hill on the mud road from the camp entrance, in the last row of buildings within the central grounds. From the windows of Block 50, the inmates could peer across a triple line of barbed wire into the notorious Little Camp, where the most hopeless among the concentration camp inmates were brought to die, or to be shipped out to terrible work details where they perished of starvation, disease and exposure.

Staffing the vaccine laboratory seemed to be quite easy. There were plenty of doctors at Buchenwald, and others who’d posed as doctors to save their skins or to follow the directives of the camp leadership. (“I had a foot injury and was operated on by a mechanic and a butcher,” one inmate remarked.) Willy Jellinek, a bright young Austrian pastry chef known as Jumbo, was in charge of the tubercular ward for a while and helped write the SS doctor Waldemar Hoven’s dissertation on lung disease for the University of Heidelberg. Jellinek came to Block 50 to prepare culture broths for the vaccine. August Cohn, a charismatic former communist labor leader, was rescued from a death sentence and put in charge of the rabbits. Ding-Schuler found a doctor with some infectious disease experience, the 36-year-old Marian Ciepielowski, to lead the vaccine production team. Ciepielowski had spent his first year at Buchenwald working with pick and shovel on a road detail. “Every day, dozens of people around me were suffocated, clubbed, stoned and shot to death, and we were all mistreated sadistically,” Ciepielowski wrote later. Handsome and blue-eyed with a well-defined widow’s peak, Ciepielowski was extremely crafty when it came to sabotage. Other inmates remarked upon his sangfroid. He was also a dedicated physician and treated many of the experimental typhus patients in Block 46.

But making the vaccine was hard—much harder than the Nazis would ever realize. In fact, Ding-Schuler from the beginning was wrestling with problems well beyond his understanding. Leading microbiologists had found it terribly difficult to produce the vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Now, Ding-Schuler was trying to do it with a group that included a baker, a physicist, a politician and a gym coach.

Even in the best of circumstances, making vaccines is a very subtle trial-and-error process, one that requires deep specialized knowledge and years of hand-to-hand training. When producing a vaccine, each step in the process might need to be altered at the same time to accommodate a particular change in the production method. For example, the Rockefeller Institute scientists who developed the yellow fever vaccine in the 1930s found that after a certain number of passages—that is, after the virus had grown in a particular sequence of animal-flesh cultures—for some reason it became weakened enough to be injected into people in a way that provided immunity but not disease. The Nazi medical bureaucracy, of course, had not considered such challenges. Ding-Schuler pressed the prisoners as soon as they set up Block 50 to produce something. He wanted tangible results.

Ding-Schuler would get results, but not what he expected. The Block 50 crew worked from a 70-page German instruction manual, apparently translated from Pasteur Institute papers. The recipe was not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the anti-vivisectionist—it involved transmitting the typhus bacteria through four different animals.

Normally, typhus germs grow only in lice and people. To get them to grow outside those species, the germs had to be modified by serial passage through animals—a rather mysterious process, but the only way, at the time, to produce the flourishing typhus cultures required to make a vaccine.

First, blood was injected into guinea pigs after being taken from feverish Block 46 “passage people”—inmates whom Ding-Schuler had purposely infected with typhus so they could serve as reservoirs for the experimental bacteria. When the guinea pigs were infected, technicians ground up their brains or testes, where for some reason the bacteria grew well. After removing most of the host tissue, the remaining liquid was injected into mice. After they sickened, the mice were killed and their lungs ground up and diluted into solutions used to infect the rabbits. These creatures, pure-blood Angoras and mixed chinchilla breeds, were infected at five months of age by stabbing a thick needle through their necks into the tracheal tube.